The Illusion of Central Position

Just as there is no Society with a capital "S", there is no Them with a capital "T". There are lots of them with a small "t", just as there are lots of societies with a small "s". Each one of them probably thinks of themselves as the capital Them, but they don't call themselves "them", they call themselves "us", and they call us "them". I think what enlightened me on this was when I found out that most primitive tribal societies called themselves "The People", or "The Real People". The Valley People called their neighbors who lived in the mountains "The Mountain People", but the Mountain People didn't call themselves "The Mountain People", they called themselves "The People", and they called their neighbors who lived in the valley "The Valley People". The reason it took our people so long to figure this out was because most of them called these tribes by the names they learned from other tribes, not from the tribe in question. For instance: Our local indigenous people, the Anishnabe, were called "Algonquians" when we went to school because that's what the Iroquois called them, and the Iroquois made contact with Europeans before the Anishnabe did. I read somewhere that the Anishnabe name for the Iroquois translates as "Real Serpents", although the book didn't say what the name was in the Anishnabe language. I also don't know what the literal translation of "Algonquians" is, but I assume it wasn't any more complimentary than the Anishnabe name for the Iroquois. What complicates matters even more is that neither of these tribes had a written language, and the first Europeans they met were Frenchmen, most of whom couldn't even read and write in French, much less English. Nevertheless, the evidence suggests that we were not the first people to call other people "them".

That being established, we are still left with the question of who were those people that voted for Trump, and why. Since there were millions of them, I think it's safe to assume there was more than one group of them. I think it's unlikely that they all got together at a single meeting and planned the whole thing. I'm sure there were meetings (plural), attended by different groups (plural) of Trump fans, and  people in each group thought of themselves as "us". I'm not sure what they called the people who attended different meetings, but I'm pretty sure they thought of the Hillary fans as "them". I also think it's reasonable to assume that some of the voters in the primaries were crossovers, at least in the states that have open primaries. I remember there was talk of crossover voters when George Wallace ran for president on the Democratic ticket back in '72. I wasn't one of them, I voted for Wallace because I wanted him to win. How's that for sticking it to the man?